You can have the best idea in the world and still lose people before you get to the point. Most of the time, the problem isn't the idea. It's that you know too much. In my last Think Business article, I share one exercise from Clarityville to help you find what your audience needs to hear, and leave the rest out.
September always feels like the start of the year to me. A year after beginning Think Visual again, I’m looking back at what grew: circles where women take their masks off, clients who found their way through a swamp and a boulder, and a board that found itself in a hawthorn tree. And a pomegranate, to wish you a sweet year.
For seven years, stretchy pants were my uniform. When a friend's wedding gave me the perfect excuse to try a new look, something that should have been fun left me overwhelmed. What I needed was already hiding in my wardrobe, and it took two friends to help me see it. The same is often true in business.
I used to hand my money anxiety to someone else and call it delegation. It cost me a fortune before I learned what I actually needed: someone to sit with me until the fear passed, not to take the problem away. That's what this Lighthouse Lab was — a room of people making friends with money, one honest question at a time.
When money arrived from my mother's estate, I couldn't touch it for months - I had no idea what it meant, or what to do with it. This is a piece about inheritance, about fear dressed up as responsibility, and about the skill neither my mother nor I was ever taught. It closes with an invitation to a Lighthouse Lab on financial confidence, Tuesday 8th September.
For many people, January is the moment for change. I'd argue September is the true one. Drawing on John O'Donohue's writing on thresholds and real stories from a coach, a designer, and a recruiter, this piece is an invitation to use the next twelve weeks well and a free printable worksheet to help you do it.
A year ago, I started a new chapter: coaching and Her Circle, a community for women in business in West Cork. Getting ready to celebrate that, I felt something I didn't expect: unease. Here's what I've learned this year about celebrating honestly, without pretending I've arrived anywhere, and why doing it together might just be an act of rebellion.
I press the number 4 in the elevator, turn left twice, and I'm back in the corridors of my mother's workplace - a room full of women who built something real while somehow also building a life around it. When she retired, she asked me a question I still can't fully answer for her. This is what stayed with me after a conversation about flexibility this week.
The first question I ask a stranger is never small talk - I want to know what they've dedicated their life to. Today it was a farmer at the sauna. A year ago it was me, closing a business I'd built over thirteen years and starting again from nothing. September has a way of turning summer's dreaming into real decisions - and this year it's brought me to a conversation with Karen O'Reilly of EmployFlex about what's changing in how people find work.
There's a story about wildland firefighters who are told, in the moment of greatest danger, to drop their tools and run - and who, again and again, choose to hold on instead. It costs them their lives. I've been asking my clients a version of the same question ever since: what are you holding onto that, if you dropped it, would let you move with more ease? My own answer came from three generations of women in my family who never once took a relaxing holiday.
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